Literature

If you’re queer and have watched And Just Like That you probably remember the picnic scene. In “Diwali,” episode 6 of the Sex and the City reboot, Miranda Hobbes, Charlotte York, and Carrie Bradshaw meet for lunch in a park along the East River. All is well until Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) reveals that she had

Accept Irrelevance! You’re Being Replaced! Alexandra Wuest  Share article The Replacement by Alexandra Wuest The news comes in the form of an email. YOU’RE BEING REPLACED, the message says, and I glance around the office. The typists are typing, the copy machine is copying, and the shredder is shredding. The room looks like the type of

Belinda Huijuan Tang grew up listening to her father’s stories of his ancestral village in Anhui, but as she writes in the author’s note of her debut novel, it wasn’t until she moved to China in 2016 that she began to think seriously about the one story he never told: “how the man who’d raised

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by mother-daughter narratives in literature. At times, it bordered on obsession. I consumed anything and everything that promised to explore the distinctive and singular ways that mothers and daughters can hurt each other. It is the tug-and-pull nature that intrigues me most—the mother’s ability to

Solar power. The end of war. Gender role reversal. Dirigibles. First published in 1905, Rokeya Hossain’s short story “Sultana’s Dream” is steampunk avant la lettre, strikingly advanced in its critique of patriarchy, conflict, conventional kinship structures, industrialization, and the exploitation of the natural world. Notably speaking to the concerns of our contemporary world as much

You Can’t Trust a Skinny Messiah if jesus was fat they wouldn’t’ve been able to hoist him up on that cross / all the paintings got his ribs showing, the contours of his stomach undulating from emptiness / a growl heard through centuries of canvas / enough to make you hungry just looking at him

One of the central questions I had when shaping my story collection, Proof of Me, was how to invite into it a unified feel, how to place each story to be in conversation—geographically, thematically, linearly—with what follows. I also sought for each story to stand on its own, offering a microcosmic glimpse into the lives

Words can, and often do, fail. For Zeina Hashem Beck, a poet and polyglot of three languages, words can, and often do, fail—threefold. This, she says, isn’t a dead end. It’s an invitation. “The words will come when it’s time. And I trust that,” she tells me via an email from Dubai. Hashem Beck’s newest volume

Addie Tsai’s novel Unwieldy Creatures is a queer, contemporary retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein set in Indonesia and the American South. The novel explores the transgressive nature of existing as a queer body, an “unwieldy creature,” in a society whose obsession with bodily perfection and beauty serves as a tool for reinforcing heteronormative standards of

On the day that Jimmy arrived, I was convinced that I was going to die. I caught H1NI three days before my thirteenth birthday, and it was early enough in the Swine Flu epidemic that my small-town Ontario doctor hadn’t seen it before and wasn’t sure how to treat it. Stomach bug symptoms came first.

When my best friend and I first saw the apartment, we loved it. We thought it a little strange, a tad bruised, but overall it felt right – and it was a good price and we needed to move quickly. When you rent a basement apartment in New York City for the price, you don’t

My Palm Reading Says I Will Die Alone Jane Campbell Share article “On Being Alone” by Jane Campbell Her fine white hair stood out around her head like a gauzy halo framing the sunburnt face. A lifetime of African sunshine had left so many creases in her skin that she looked as though her tiny body

Taymour Soomro’s debut novel Other Names for Love begins with a son flinching at the sound of his father’s voice. Sixteen-year-old Fahad has been ordered to spend the summer with Rafik, his authoritarian father who manages their family farm in Sindh, Pakistan. It’s on the train ride there that Rafik offers up his animating belief:

There’s a scene in Ethiopian-American writer Dinaw Mengestu’s novel All Our Names that I think back on a lot. A white social worker, Helen, living in the effectively still segregated 1970s American Midwest, has decided she is going to make a point (maybe to herself) by bringing her lover Isaac—an Ethiopian foreign exchange student—to a

“Zombies didn’t discriminate. Everyone tasted equally good as far as zombies were concerned. And anyone could be a zombie. You didn’t have to be special, or good at sports, or good-looking. You didn’t have to smell good, or wear the right kind of clothes, or listen to the right kind of music. You just had

Take a break from the news We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven’t read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox. YOUR INBOX IS LIT Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of

Gentrification takes center stage in Cleyvis Natera’s debut novel Neruda on the Park, which follows the different reactions the members of the Guerrero family have to the impending redevelopment of their predominantly Dominican New York City neighborhood.When a neighboring tenement is demolished to make way for a luxury complex of condominiums in their neighborhood, the

Noir has long been obsessed with books—books as objects, as evidence, as repositories of the past, and occasionally as glimpses into other worlds of possibility. It’s no wonder, then, that booksellers often turn up in fiction, and especially in mystery. There’s something intoxicating about the turn a story takes when the characters walk into a